Mark W. Dobin

Interactive 3D seismic fault detection on the Graphics Hardware

This paper presents a 3D, volumetric, seismic fault detection system that re lies on a novel set of nonlinear filters combined with a GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) implementation, which make s interactive nonlinear, volumetric processing feasible. The method uses a 3D structure tensor to robustly me asure seismic orientations. These tensors guide an anisotropic diffusion, which reduces noise in the data while enhanc ing the fault discontinuity and coherency along seismic strata. A fault-likelihood volume is computed using a dir ectional variance measure, and 3D fault voxels are then extracted through a non-maximal-suppression meth od. We also show how the proposed algorithms are efficiently implemented with a GPU programming model, and compa re this to a CPU implementation to show the benefits of using the GPU for this computationally demanding proble m.